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All About [Nuclear Weapons]
The Ender
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...Have you been introduced to my friend Hubris? Oh yes, she is quite lovely, isn't she? Single, too.
What is a nuclear weapon, anyway?
That was the letter signed by Albert Einstein & written by Leó Szilárd that ultimately led to the Manhatten Project, which prototyped and detonated the weapon (named 'Trinity') which produced the explosion seen at the top of this post. That was a small, very inefficient bomb, with a 'mere' 20 kiloton yield. For a direct comparison to conventional TNT, this overhead photograph shows the post-detonation Crossroads test site, where 108 tons of TNT were exploded as a benchmark for the Trinity test:
The TNT created the '0,1 KT test crater'.
Nuclear weapons use a runaway fission reaction to create explosions that are, ton for ton, orders of magnitude larger than can be created by any other man-made explosive. Crude fission bombs are frighteningly simple to create, now that the general principles are understood:
Surround a critical mass of plutonium with shaped explosive charges, and set the charges off simultaneously. You'll produce a kilton-yield reaction with surprisingly little material.
Multi-megaton hydrogen bombs are not as easy to produce, but are 'overkill' in many respects and in some ways are less dangerous than kiloton yield bombs because they shoot their 'fallout' (the radioactive debris from all of the burned people, buildings, cars, etc) very high into the atmosphere, where it's dispersed into extremely diluted concentrations before raining back to the Earth.
A much more detailed description of how fission bombs work has been provided by CptHamilton:
CptHamilton wrote:Normal, lower-yield nuclear weapons use a conventional explosive to create a run-away fission reaction in a fissile core. The reaction rapidly depletes the fissile fuel and extinguishes itself. The reaction has to be extremely fast to achieve the kind of expansion needed for a weapon, which places an upper limit on how large a quantity of fissile material you can detonate. Past a certain point, C4 simply isn't going to energize enough of the material to induce a fast enough fission cascade that all of the material undergoes fission and expels energy in the blast. Instead you'd have an explosion and then something like an un-shielded nuclear reactor core sitting there on the ground being hot as shit.
You can improve the effectiveness of the weapon using a 'boosted' fission process, wherein some easily-fused material (tritium, for example) is placed in the fissile core of the bomb. The energy of the fission reaction is sufficient to compress the fusion fuel and initiate a fusion reaction. The fusion reaction produces a bunch of high-energy neutrons, which then kick off fission in the un-reacted fissile material. Only 1.4 and 17%, respectively, of the fuel in the (un-boosted) bombs dropped on Japan was consumed.
A hydrogen bomb is essentially a boosted fission bomb with a big chunk of fusion fuel stuck on it. Conventional explosives kick off a boosted fission reaction. Energy from the fission reaction is transferred to a reserve of fusion fuel (tritium or deuterium; both isotopes of Hydrogen that are much easier to fuse than standard Hydrogen) inside of a fission-resistant sheath. The compressed fuel undergoes nuclear fusion and the resulting energy blows stuff up. But it won't fuse any ambient Hydrogen in the process; once the tritium fuel is expended, the reaction stops.
Are terrorists with briefcases containing nuclear bombs a real possible threat?
Not really. On paper, it's theoretically possible to contain a critical mass of plutonium and enough C4 to cause a chain reaction in a large duffel bag (you couldn't make a U-235 bomb and stick in a duffel bag. It would just be way too big). In reality:
1) Plutonium is extremely toxic, unstable & dangerous to handle outside of rigorously controlled environment (and even in those environments, there have been lethal accidents involving plutonium cores). Anyone building a duffel bag bomb in their basement would very likely die of radiation poisoning before completing the project, and / or accidentally allow the plutonium to decay to a non-explosive state.
2) Such a device would be too heavy to carry. Between the explosives, the critical mass and the casing needed to ensure a symmetrical explosion, nobody is going to be casually lugging something like that to a park or putting it on an aircraft or bus.
3) Plutonium is not easy to come by. It's a man-made element that decays rapidly, so you can't just steal some from a mine or civilian reactor. You need expertise & high tech facilities to produce it.
4) A duffel-bag sized device would require substantial engineering knowledge for miniaturization of it's non-critical components.
It's not out of the question that a terrorist state might be able to crudely deliver a low-tech fission bomb to a neighboring country and set it off, say via a transport truck or boat, but the 24 notion that an individual could smuggle a small nuclear weapon into your city under the cover of nightfall is an ignorant fantasy.
I hear MAD all of the time. Why you so MAD, bro?
MAD is an acronym for 'Mutually Assured Destruction' - the supposed keystone of the Cold War. The United States and Soviet Union each had a variety of bomber and missile forces ready to strike at a moment's notice (or so goes the popular claim; there's plenty of reason to doubt it, now that we've had the chance to view to Soviet archives), and this was paradoxically (again, so goes the story) both the gravest threat to the world and the thing that prevented a single missile from taking flight: each side knew that if they tried to strike their opponent, they would be anihilated in turn. Thus, 'Mutually Assured Destruction'.
MAD is another one of those things much different in practice than on paper. There was at least one occassion where a nuclear attack submarine was given launch codes an an order to attack from the Kremlin; the commander of the boat simpy refused to follow the order. There were probably similar incidents on the American side of things, but we don't know because the records are sealed and will probably remain sealed indefinitely.
Who has nukes? Who is supposed to have nukes? Why does anyone have nukes?
The U.S., UK, France, China, Russia, India, Pakistan and North Korea have confirmed nuclear weaponry. Israel is highly suspected to have them, but insists it does not.
South Africa had a nuclear weapons program, but ultimately did the grown-up thing and abandoned it / dismantled the warheads.
All of the old Cold War players began reducing their nuclear arsenals once tensions began to relax, and the reductions have increased over the years. America's current stance is that it will always maintain a reserve of warheads for 'deterrent' (a nice of way of saying that they will use them if some vaguely defined conditions for mass murder of civilians are met), while the UK, France and China essentially follow the same trend without outright stating it. Pakistan & India are involved in their own miniature sort of Cold War regarding their arsenals (though even they have pedged to draw down their warheads and not expand their arsenals), while North Korea and Israel are in a somewhat enigmatic state where they plainly have fission bombs but have not made their intentions clear are not really trustworthy even if they did.
The international non-proliferation treaty seeks the abolishment of all nuclear weapons, period, and the creation of a mandate for making the production of such weaponry illegal (the equivalent of a war crime). The United States feels that it ought to have more or less exclusive control over the trafficking of fission bombs. The UK & France have a very libertarian outlook (that everyone should be able to produce them... well, almost everyone. Everyone except the brown people, because who can trust them?). Most other countries take the stance that, regardless of what anyone else does, they have a right to build and use nuclear bombs if they want, and the non-proliferation treaty can go fuck itself.
So, basically, it's a self-centered clusterfuck. Each country feels like they should have them and nobody else should, because everyone feels like they are the smartest guy in the room and thus the most capable of handling a technology that, in reality, human beings are not really responsibe enough to handle at all.
What is a \nuclear winter'? Could we really destroy the planet with our bombs?
Well, we couldn't literally blow apart the Earth with our nuclear arsenals; we could just render it uninhabitable, or destroy so much of our infrastructure that modern civilization collapses (might eventually recover, might not). Nuclear winter is a theoretical side-effect of a full exchange of multi-megaton ICBMs between countries - if the explosions shot enough material from cities & refineries into the upper atmosphere, it could cause a positive feedback loop that sends the Earth into a severe ice age (the sort that once upon a time produced 'snowball Earth'. The science is a bit dodgy and it's a disputed topic (mostly the arguments surround whether or not nuclear blasts would send sufficient volumes of ash high enough into the atmosphere), but it was popular among academics during the cold war because of the size of the bombs in circulation and the real threat of an extreme attack / counter-attack.
Nowadays, nuclear winter is - essentually - an impossibility.
So, let's talk bombs. Big bombs.
The Ender on
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Not exactly. Basically the science went, "Wait, shit, this is possible" in the early 80s, then "Wait, no, it wouldn't be THAT bad" in the late 80s, then ambiguous for a while where your hawkish types wanted to debunk it and your anti-war types wanted to exaggerate it. But recent climate studies and simulations make it clear that nuclear winter is a real deal. Even a light exchange (India/Pakistan) would cause noticeable global cooling for 1-2 years; at least a full degree in average temperature drop. An exchange of Cold War-era arsenals between the USSR and the US, striking Europe, Russia, Canada and the US (toss in China for added fun) would eliminate the growing season in the northern hemisphere for up to two years, and cause 10-20+ degree drops in average temperatures for 5+ years afterwards. Which is enough to kill 99% of the survivors- again, in the northern hemisphere. An exchange like that makes for an unusually cold and lengthy series of winters for Argentina, but nothing apocalyptic.
Now, it's true that there's no real chance of a "snowball Earth" scenario, no triggering of a prolonged ice age. But something much, much worse than say the Krakatoa winter? Totally possible. Now, modern Russia/US arsenals are smaller and we don't have as many weapons "on alert", so the winter projection for that kind of exchange is more like one year without summer. And the final casualty count depends on the time of year and the manner of the war- a counterforce fight wouldn't blow up as many cities, if the harvest had been completed food stocks would be more than enough for the survivors, etc.
Anyway, from a policy perspective, the prospect of nuclear winter is definitely real enough I consider it foolish the US ended its Strategic Food Reserve program.
(I hate to just make blithe claims, but all my links on the subject are on my other computer)
To add to this, the "suitcase nuke" urban myth is based on man-portable real world weapons...that are like the size of a huge backpack duffel bag that are "Man portable" only in the loosest sense. There are supposed to be missing Soviet backpack nukes...but they've been "missing" for 20+ years. Nuclear weapons expire. They have a shelf-life. Any such weapon that was in the hands of terrorists might make a fine dirty bomb, but fission at this point is impossible. So even if some of these weapons really had been misplaced, they wouldn't actually work.
Added.
Nuclear Summer is an (even more hypothetical) possibility that would come after the winter subsided. Basically, a nuclear exchange would release an enormous amount of otherwise sequestered greenhouse gases in the form of forest fires, burning cities, destroyed oil and gas refineries- all of which would pump a lot of CO2, CH4, etc, into the atmosphere all at once. So once the sulphate aerosols causing the winter (which generally have a very short tail in the atmosphere) have all fallen back down, the atmosphere gets back to what it was already doing- warming up, only faster. The loss of human industry and its CO2 emissions wouldn't counter-balance the effects of most of that human industry being lost because it was on fire.
Then you've got the nitrogen oxides- ozone destroyers- released by the nuclear detonations themselves. So you've got continued (even accelerated) global warming with the kicker of a shredded ozone layer. Hello a hotter, dryer, UV saturated Earth. Remember this is after the worst series of winters in human history, where a lot of your plant life is going to have died- we are talking possible desertification on a massive scale, especially given possible loss of forests due to fire + unnaturally long winter.
The only upside is that all this probably doesn't exceed the environmental costs of sustaining human society in the first place, so even with all this there's every possibility of a "garden ruin" in affected countries. Or wastelands. Depends on how bad the winter was, how bad the war was, etc.
As I understand it, the old 'backpack bombs' also weighed 500-700 lbs, with the duffel bags acting as crude camoflage rather than being functional.
I just added that section because I know of computer models that show in 'black and white' math that it is physically possible to construct a fission bomb with a plutonium core that would fit inside a large duffel bag. The feasibility of actually accomplishng such a task is basically zero, but I know of people who are shown that sort of modeling and say, "Gee whiz, I guess this really is something to worry about!"
Do you have a source for the nuclear winter information you posted? If you do, I will add it to the OP.
I've got it all on my other computer. I'll post some links when I get home, or after I wake up after going to bed after I get home. (At work now)
Also Japan. I saw a map once that colored in countries that "could have nuclear weapons within a year if they so chose" and Canada and Japan were the ones I remembered on it. I'm sure Germany could, should it have a mind to do so.
Argentina once considered a bomb program, as I recall, as did Brazil.
What about Japan and Germany? They have civilian reactor programs, but not nuclear programs.
A lot of academics realized pretty quickly that the hawkish jarheads in Washington all talked about MAD in public, but in private thought that MAD was a bunch of bullshit and that so long as they took the first shot the Soviets would not be able / willing to retaliate.
After this mentality in Washington became clear, people like Sagan started talking about nuclear winter and building models for it based on some questionable science, not because they actually feared for a nuclear winter, but because they needed to provide the Pentagon with a reason to not try shooting at the Soviets. They didn't want their country to commit a mass-murder, and they believed (and were probably correct to believe) that the 'MAD' paradox wasn't enough.
Any thoughts on this?
I have a tumblr.
Check it out.
Two near misses come to mind. The first is during the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis; that event deserves a longer "holy fuck this is crazy!" post. The other is the 1983 ABLE ARCHER wargame exercises conducted by NATO, which freaked out the USSR such that it put its forces on alert and the world came almost as close to nuclear war as it had in 1962.
The problem is that the benefit of striking first is unambiguous; you could conceivably save your civilization- well, until even the second strike capabilities of both countries were so thoroughly developed it was annihilation either way- but the cost of going to war at all is so huge you really, really don't want to do it. But the other guy would benefit from striking first. The most dangerous period of the Cold War was the time where one or the other side could juuuuust barely conceive of a victory scenario. It was only after 1978 that the USSR had actual parity; before that they knew they could hurt the US badly enough to deter war, but also knew that they'd still come out the "loser" (whatever that means).
This means in terms of actual weapon balance the most dangerous period was ~1978-1985; whoever struck first during that period would have had a potentially decisive advantage. Before that, the USSR had no incentive to strike at all and the US had no incentive to go from a superpower to a fourth-rate minor power and general hellhole. After that, the choice between total annihilation and just general hellhole-ization is a little more unclear.
After 1985 (or 1982, or 1983, or 1978; it depends on the estimates you use) no one could have won even with an extremely generous definition of "win", since you'd have killed off 99% of the population in the northern hemisphere just from climate effects. Even if you degraded the enemy's strike capability with a supremely effective first strike making their retaliation non-comprehensive, burning all their cities and forests would have destroyed your own growing season.
Nuclear strategists were, luckily, always aware that whatever "victory" scenarios they could figure out, there was always the thought: "Sure we could 'win', but why would we want to?"
My favorite near-miss was the November 1979 episode where a mislabeled training tape was accidentally played on Norad computers, and for a few moments the commanders & operators thought it was a real attack.
Yup.
Almost killed everyone on the planet because Private McGee applied the wrong sticker.
Yeah, but I should have clarified I meant during the decade+ after 45.
I remember seeing that chart with Japan, and wondered where South Korea would fit in.
The US developed a 10-20 ton equivilent package that only weighed 76 lbs and had dimensions that would easily fit into a duffel bag. They built about 2000 of them in the 50s through 60s. Look up the "Davy Crocket Weapon System".
The Davy Crockett:
Small teams of a couple guys (teams of 3 operated it, but theres no numbers on how many in each patrol) were set up along USSR's border and europe during the cold war. like every couple kilometers. They only had explosive power of 10-20 tons of TNT, but their purpose was in case of a land assualt and troop movement, we could fucking irradiate their entire fucking border for 48 hours while NATO got all of its troops together and moved in They could never get the thing to be accurate, it would airburst and had a range of about a mile or two. Its primary use was for irradiating the area as deterrant, which would do lethal doses of radiation for like a quarter of a mile. about 2,100 of these things got made.
@Midshipman : This is what you were referring to. the warhead would of fit in a duffel bag(my understanding is it was alot heavier then 76 pounds), but theres no duffelbag on the planet that could lift that weight. It also required the tripod/recoiless rifle to fire which was either on the tripod or mounted to apc's/jeeps. We also aren't worried about a quarter mile radius 48 hour dirty bomb in the normal backpack nuke scenario.
You're talking about the W54 warheads, right? Reagan's fantasy weapons that drained huge resources and, as demonstrated in the Hardtrack tests, had a laughable shelf-life and reliably failed to create a fission reaction?
The much lauded '10 ton' explosions were never formally recorded, only theoretical, and in every real test the weapons failed to explode at all.
It's worth noting that, as I posted, these 'weapons of the FUTURE-UR-UR-UR-UR! ' didn't even work. They were the functional equivalent of plutonium-infused pipe bombs.
Wikipedia says they worked just fine.
Considering they made a small crater and shot out an invisible field of death, I am pretty sure it would be super effective against a horde of troops marching in. Theres no way soldiers would have giger counters on them(which admittedly they might order people to walk through anyways).
I think you forgot Russia.
I stand corrected; I was only aware of the Hardtrack fizzles. I hadn't realized the program had progressed from that point.
Still, I think it's reasonable to say that no individual can successfully cook-up a weapon that the weight of the U.S. military developed over the course of 3 years, for all of the reason I listed in the OP.
Oops! Fixed.
o.O
You and I have very different ideas of what 'really cool' is, or what a 'decent use' for a nuclear weapon is. Killing a few thousand people via radiation poisoning and radioactively polluting miles of land for decades / centuries does not strike me as being very 'cool', and in any case, the Soviets (like the Americans) were prepared for tactical nuclear weaponry and had NBC protection built into their tanks & later model BMPs.
One of the truly terrifying television programmes I have ever watched is the depiction of nuclear war in Britain; Threads. No word of a lie, it is soul crushing.
On the lighter side of nuclear weapons, until recently the nuclear weapons of the UK were protected using a bicycle lock. We still have a system where the nukes can be launched without any authorisation from the Prime Minister or heads of the Armed forces. It arises mostly of being so close to the USSR that the chain of command would be wiped out by the time any launch codes could ever be sent.
Source for the 48 hour figure? Plutonium's half life is short, but the radiation usually sticks around for quite a while.
At any rate, I'm curious why you think an armored column of NBC protected T-72s would be stopped by irradiatied terrain?
That sounds like a very PR friendly way to describe what it does
In reality I have a hard time believing it only lasted for 48 hours
I would love to, but that's beyond the limits of my knowledge. I have no idea how radiation poisoning actually works; I just know it's Very Bad.
I'm leery of talking about it without my references handy.
The bigger obstacle might have been, starting with the BMP-1, the Soviet Army (and eventually most other armies) developed a simple, highly effective nuclear/biological/chemical containment system, usually using simple overpressure device alongside a filtration system. So while such a weapon could physically harm any portion of an army group, the idea of creating an impenetrable barrier of radiation wasn't really all that viable. The USSR put such a system on all of their IFVs, tanks, and even air-dropped amphibious vehicles, and other countries followed the example.
^ This ^
In fairness, I wouldn't have personally trusted the BMP-1's NBC package with my life, given the vehicle's exposed gun ports - but then what about the the T-72? The later model BMPs? The MI-24?
The idea of a radiation barrier is just stupid. I can't find any source that backs-up the poster's claim, so it might not even have been a proposed strategy, but such stupid plans do line-up with the Reagan Pentagon's general strategies so I'll take the guy's word for it.
The lingering radiation's lethality depends on concentration and distance from the ground when it detonated, with the optimal burst height (for thermal and shockwave damage) usually also meaning minimum release of fallout materials. Only ground bursts at hardened targets (silos, etc) would leave an area truly deadly to the unprotected to even go near for a long time. And only ground bursts would release a LOT of fallout, especially heavy particulates that would settle on the ground immediately rather than get dispersed broadly into the upper atmosphere.
(IIRC and I might not) for a normal air burst, the deadliest isotopes from any non-salt jacketed weapon will have expired within two hours. Then the next benchmarks (in increasing order of "you can safely be in the area for X amount of time") are two days, two weeks, and two months, after which only the long-lasting stuff that causes birth defects and such is around and most of that is dispersed so broadly there's no need to "worry" about it; you either get cancer in twenty years or you don't.
If you're in a fallout zone in those two hours, it's bad news (again depending on the concentration) for you in a matter of minutes. In the first two days, anything more than an hour (IIRC, and I probably don't) and you're in for serious radiation poisoning. If I remember my sheltering guidelines, it'll be safe to stay for prolonged periods of time in a hot zone after two weeks, though limiting exposure as much as possible (work periods of 4 hours or less rather than 8, etc) is wise. "You can leave the vault in two weeks" is the bottom line; venturing out before that carries risks and requires precautions and care.
These are guidelines I"m dimly remembering intended for civilian use in an emergency so they're simplified. I have a chart of isotope decay rates and what isotopes are released by what weapons, but I have no idea where it is.
Calculating a lethal dose of radiation is complicated, too. You can sustain a dose over a lifetime that'd kill you in minutes if you took it all at once.
The amount of fallout deposited in an area (and the resulting radioactivity) is dependent on all sorts of factors. If it rains soon after a bomb goes off, an area might get hit by a lot more fallout than it would had that material not been captured by rain clouds and then deposited on the ground, instead dispersing into the upper atmosphere.
You probably wouldn't want to trust any NBC system from the late-50s/early-60s with your life, period, regardless of origin (the Soviet Army didn't, which is why they manufactured millions of gas masks and full-body suits to go with the BMP-1). The point stands that even the BMP-1, literally the first infantry fighting vehicle, was designed with circumventing a radiation barrier--one mysteriously immune to the effects of wind or weather conditions--in mind. Firing ports, while probably not very effective to actually shoot people, were designed to be sealed with overpressure, making them a non-issue, and that was 50 years ago! The subsequent BMP-2, BMP-3, T-64, literally everything that could actually be sealed (basically, was not an open car) would feature it, because it was cheap and reasonably effective. Shit, the system on the T-55 tank was designed to and performed on inspection a third of a second after detecting gamma radiation. On a T-55. The Ford Model T of main battle tanks. You'd be better off blowing up the tank with said weapon, because radiation sure as hell isn't going to kill the crew unless their tank somehow isn't able to move and they all die of dehydration or starve to death. And if the tank's crew dies fourteen years later, surrounded by their families in their home town's hospitals, then the objective was missed as well.
It's a case of a strategy that isn't just suspect itself, but the obvious counterplan is relatively cheap and effective.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acute_radiation_syndrome